The Making of Us

Having invited them to write those important letters, during our welcome tea party I would explain to the crowd of slightly apprehensive new parents that we would be encouraging the girls’ independence right from the start. So soon? their faces said. My own mother’s maxim was that as a good parent you should make your child independent of you ‘as early as possible’ and this very practical and sound advice, especially for working mothers, I have always kept in mind. As parents, they would not be told every little thing, because this was a stage where the pupils would be encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and sort out some of their own challenges. There are many things for the girls to adjust to on starting life in a new, bigger school, with more pupils and teachers, more subjects to get used to and a totally new way of doing things, I would tell them. But we would all be there to help. For example, if as a pupil you are too busy attending lots of exciting after-school clubs to get your homework done (a very familiar problem to many an eager new eleven-year-old) this is a thing to talk to your tutor about. You don’t need to rush to involve your mother or father. At this I would see the parents looking hesitant: surely it was up to them to know everything, to smooth away all the snowdrifts blocking their path? No, I would say firmly. Education is about learning to solve problems for yourself, even though that adjustment and releasing of parental control is very hard.

For us parents, this learning to let go is a lifelong counter-intuitive lesson (I’m still working on it and my children are in their early twenties) and we are greatly helped in the adjustment if, at the secondary stage, the school makes the effort to forge an effective and trusting relationship with us. As a head I was always aware that mutual trust could only be built up over time, but the school needed to make clear that this was a priority. Reminding parents that as a parent myself I was not unaware of the adjustment they were having to make, at that same welcome tea party I would talk about the exciting journey we were embarking on together, entering into partnership in the care and education of their children, and how important it was that we established good channels of communication – and then kept them open. During your daughter’s time with us there will be ups and downs, I warned lightly. The teenage years are coming! If you are having difficulty adjusting to that bored sigh when you ask what your daughter did at school, wait until you are getting the adolescent eye roll accompanied by ‘Hello …?’ when you make some well-intentioned but hopelessly inept remark about modern social mores or popular culture.

School and home need to work together – or at least in trusting partnership. With long experience of teenagers, we have dealt with most things: absenteeism, amnesia about homework deadlines, absconding, arson … one could go on through the alphabet but you get my point. We try always to operate from the principle that the school is a place to learn about boundaries but wherever possible to have the chance to start again and do better. But of course we know that having heard your daughter’s own account of events, you may not necessarily always see things as we do. If as parents you are unhappy about the way we handle something, try not to talk about the school critically in front of your daughter at home, but come and talk to me or your daughter’s tutor. Children are naturally loyal – both to their school, and to their parents. The girl who has heard her parents running the school down at home cannot then look her headmistress in the eye: an invisible line has been crossed; something is wrong in her world. I have seen this on a few occasions and it always saddens me to see the girl removed from that happy circle of security and unsure of the way back. We need to build up, to see her through good times and bad, that precious, triangular relationship of trust and respect between pupil, parents and school. This is incredibly important to the security and stability of your daughter. Once it has been damaged, it can be very difficult to repair. If you promise not to criticise us at home, I would end with a wry smile, I promise I will not say to your daughter: ‘I hear your mother has been complaining again, Anya!’ If the parents felt they had had a talk from the headmistress, well, they had. Better that than have communication breakdown later when, inevitably, it would be the girl who suffered.

So how to be a good ‘new’ parent? Remember that whatever school meant to you, your child is writing her own story. Get used to the fact that you will not know everything: be sure to forge a good relationship with your child’s most important adult at school – probably the tutor – which means not expecting daily personal bulletins on progress, but a relationship of trust where you would feel comfortable to be in touch if you had a genuine concern or worry. Respect the fact that your child will choose her own friends, develop her own opinions and explore her own interests: this is her education after all … Encourage and enjoy her growing independence, for just as she develops her separate life from you, just as surely she will want, in her own time, to share parts of it too.

In thinking about ourselves as former pupils and now as parents, projecting our own memories of school onto the fresh experience of our children, we have always to keep in mind that the world today is very different from the world in which we grew up ourselves. It sounds so obvious. The generation growing up in schools today – sometimes called Generation Z or the post-millennial generation – have for one thing never known a world without the internet, the iPhone and the iPad. Using technology comes naturally to them and they are used to the freedoms it brings: the ability to find out information instantly, the ability to connect with others unlimited by time and space and the ability to create virtual identities which appear to be untrammelled by the responsibilities of normal life. In cities especially, children tend to be both less connected to their immediate communities and less interested in national politics while at the same time being better informed about the macro, global problems of inequality, poverty and climate change. Following the financial crisis of 2008 and the revaluation of financial power, together with the loss of respect for certain industries such as banking, there is now a more general questioning of the authority of institutions. This generation does not find virtue in patience; with the answer to anything a screen touch away, students value speed over accuracy. However, while they may be able to source information very fast, they are less equipped to discriminate as to whether sources are trustworthy. When you take a book out of the school library, you pretty much know it is worth reading or it wouldn’t be there. Look up something online and you don’t necessarily have that assurance. The prevalence of mental ill health in young people points amongst other things to the darker side of the fast-moving and technological world they inhabit, and the sense of being alone which prevails within the virtual world of cyber connectivity. All that said, Generation Z are fired with a great sense of social responsibility: they grasp the fact that if the species is to survive, they will need to turn a competitive world in which wealth is more and more unequally distributed into a collaborative one where shrinking natural resources are shared. Many opt to volunteer their time in projects which have social benefits either at home or abroad (almost every girl in the top year was doing this by the time I left St Paul’s) and they look forward to careers which will be more varied and less linear than those their parents have experienced. (I will return to specific aspects of this wider context and the Generation Z mindset in later chapters.) The point to emphasise here is that the prevailing characteristic which they and therefore schools need to grapple with is a climate of much greater uncertainty and unpredictability. This provides challenge and opportunity and we have to prepare them for both. To lead fulfilled lives and contribute to society they will need more than their natural optimism and enviably short memory for things that went wrong. They will need creativity and imagination, the ability to work with others and to apply their knowledge in new situations, and they will also need resilience and grit. Increasingly therefore, these are qualities we are actively addressing in our schools.

At the start of the year, for the school itself, with all the hopes and aspirations of so many people to meet and manage, creating the make-believe of a beginning offers special challenges – for leadership and for teamwork. I often thought of the process in terms of flying a large, fully loaded passenger aircraft. As the head, you’re the pilot: you climb aboard, settle into your seat and check the controls, remove your peaked cap and taxi down the runway. The great machine, loaded with its freight of people, luggage and expectations, gathers speed, and then by a miracle of engineering, with much shuddering and thanks to laws of physics that few understand, the whole thing climbs into the skies and becomes airborne. At St Paul’s, with almost 250 staff and over 740 pupils, that point came when the first staff meeting, the first assembly, and the arrival and induction of new staff and pupils were all comfortably ticked off. At last I would put away my file with its dividers marked ‘beginning of school year’ and think to myself: okay, so far so good. Now we climb to cruising altitude.

Leaders need to tell stories, and good stories have a beginning that makes you want to read on. The start of a new academic year provides various opportunities as a head for using a public forum – of which the school assembly is one example – to set the tone and mood, and engage everyone with excitement for the challenges ahead. That’s how you would speak to the girls, but then there are the staff to think about. In speaking to any large audience it’s important that each person feels you are speaking directly to them. Keeping the analogy of the story in mind, everyone listening to you is a character in the adventure you are about to begin and great things are only achieved when teams of people work together, each person seeing what it is that they (and only they) can contribute to the whole. I made sure that the opening staff meeting of the year was attended by everyone – not only teachers, but the cleaning and catering staff, business managers, those who worked in the offices, together with technicians and groundsmen too – we were one team, all contributing to the unfolding story of one school.

There was always a lively receptivity at that meeting and I was often struck how after the much-needed summer break everyone looked so startlingly young and refreshed. The last time we were all together in June, people were utterly exhausted: now they had bright eyes and outdoor faces, ready for anything. News of summer projects flowed; particularly enjoyable were the pithy accounts of school trips: ‘We made only a passing visit to the accident and emergency department at the hospital in Rome this year’, or ‘The ground staff at Heathrow were pleasantly surprised that we had only to make one dash back through the airport to retrieve a passport from the seat pocket.’ The publication of public exam results (consistently excellent at St Paul’s and therefore a highlight of this meeting, though not vaunted externally) meant thanks to everyone: if you taught or fed the pupils, or mended their computers or cleaned their classrooms, you shared that success. The school took the decision some years ago to withdraw from the regular round of published league tables to take the emphasis away from this crude measure of educational quality, but it didn’t stop us enjoying privately working out where we would have been placed had we submitted our data and the director of studies would enjoy regaling us with our theoretical placing amongst our keenest competitors. Whoever you were, this was your moment to feel proud of being part of the success story. After an hour, people would edge along the rows of cinema-style chairs to head for coffee in the staffroom, feeling surprisingly good: valued, happy to be back, ready for all that the term might bring.

The next day, there was the first assembly of the school year, which was my opportunity to welcome those who were new. Standing at the carved wooden lectern in the centre of the stage in Gerald Horsley’s Great Hall, this was a new beginning for everyone, I would remind them. For the girls new to the school, seated cross-legged on the shiny floorboards at the very front of the hall in clothes picked out with more care than they ever would be again, it marked the start of life as a Paulina and all that meant in terms of pride and identity. For new staff, the beginning of a fresh chapter in their career; and for other students, a shift in their position in the seven-year narrative of school life. How immensely grown up it must feel, to be twelve and entering the ‘UIV’, (Upper IV – the equivalent of year 8 at St Paul’s) and not to be a MIV (Middle IV – year 7) any more, with the senior girls looking at you fondly as if you were a small fluffy animal. How significant to be entering the VI (year 11) and know that you were in the run-up to GCSE just a few months away. Or even more exciting, to have entered the Senior School (sixth form) with the privilege of sitting on the red upholstered seats on the balcony of the hall, a position affording you a critical view of events below and one to which you had been aspiring for a full five years.

It was also an important moment to begin setting the tone and values for the new pupils, and to begin on some of the themes for modern life. What did it mean to have arrived at St Paul’s? I would often use a recent event as a parallel story. In September 2008, for example, the Beijing Olympics provided the perfect subject. Here’s what I said to the girls that morning:

I’m speaking especially to those of you who are new Paulinas and I hope the rest of you will find some echoes in what I’m saying. We’re probably all feeling a bit uncomfortable this morning: we’ve had to get up earlier; we’ve abandoned our flip-flops for proper shoes, the floor of the hall is every bit as hard as we remembered although it is a bit shinier (thank you Mr Radford and maintenance) and the summer holidays are rapidly receding.

Those of you who are new are in unfamiliar surroundings – which is a bit daunting. What you’ll gradually do, starting today, is find your place within this new world of school. There will be questions in your mind: how do I find my way around? Who will my friends be? How will I fit in with my class and my year group? Will the work be hard? How will I find the music rooms for my piano lesson? Probably all of us remember asking those questions on the first day and now wonder why we worried about them.

St Paul’s will encourage you to feel at home and also help you become independent. We’ll encourage you to think for yourself, to develop and test your opinions, to pursue your own interests. Most people find the school a very open, friendly and supportive place. I hope you’ll find it so too. Those of you who are old hands, please lend the newcomers all the help you can.

I hope you’ve all had a great holiday. Whatever you have been doing over the past few weeks, most of you will have watched some of the Olympic Games happening in Beijing. I know some of you were lucky enough to go out to China to watch. If you’ve been following, you will know that:

• 204 countries took part

• 10,500 athletes competed in twenty-eight sports ranging from athletics to BMX cycling and beach volleyball

• Team GB won nineteen gold medals, the most since a hundred years ago when the games were here in London at White City.

We all have a natural desire to strive for success, but even for Olympic athletes, such success does not come easily. In swimming, for example, the Dutch athlete Marten Van Der Weijden, who won the open water event, was six years ago in hospital with leukaemia. He said: ‘My illness taught me to think step by step, to think about the next hour, to be patient – the same strategy I chose here to take my moment, to take the lead.’ That was a truly inspirational win. Natalie du Toit, of South Africa, a top-flight international swimmer who lost a leg in a motorcycle accident in 2001, competed in the same event. She said: ‘I want to do everything on merit – this is not just a free ride.’ And things did not always come easily either to Michael Phelps, USA, who won eight gold medals (the greatest number ever in a single Olympics). He had struggled at nursery school with attention deficit disorder.

So, whether you were supporting Team GB, or another country’s athletes, you couldn’t fail to be aware of the sheer hard work, the hope and ambition; the connection between effort and excellence. Simon Barnes, writing in The Times, said of the British team that they were not just winning gold medals, but they were ‘setting the agenda for excellence’. Perhaps as we look forward to the year ahead, we can – in our own way – do that too.

You are all here because you have shown through competition that you have outstanding talent and outstanding potential. That should not make you smug or complacent because it gives you a responsibility – to make as much of those gifts as you possibly can. You will enjoy some great teaching here, but what you make of your potential will be to a large extent up to you. What we do together, in this school, is to aim as high as we can; to use our capability in the best way – not just when things go well, but when we stumble and things get harder too.

I would return to this idea of managing our own expectations of ourselves repeatedly when talking to both the students and staff, through the year. In some ways it became one of the most important messages of all in the constant task of balancing a stretching, challenging and exciting education with the fact that we all have edges to our capability and striving for excellence has to be tempered with an awareness of our individual limits. A happy balance is found when demands are great enough for energy and confidence to flow but not so great that they tip us over into stress and anxiety. In a school like St Paul’s, where the pupils are prodigiously talented, that balance, I found, had to be struck and restruck. Aspirations should be set high while being tempered with the active building of self-esteem and confidence, especially in girls who, in my experience, are inclined (partly because of the high standards they set themselves) to doubt themselves more than they should. Equally, that confidence mustn’t spill over into complacency or arrogance. One girl said to me privately, ‘I hate it when people say how clever we are …’ She felt it as a pressure, an unhelpful label. Only through the constant conversation could that balance be achieved and kept in fruitful equilibrium.

School assemblies, whether at the start of the year or not, rather than being merely ‘a hymn, a prayer and a bollocking’ – as one distinguished headmistress colourfully described them – can inform and set the tone, convey values and ethos as well as sometimes amuse and entertain. That is why I fought to keep the whole-school assembly (three times a week by the time I left the school) and would defend its value fiercely. Assemblies have been the vehicle through which I’ve conveyed some of the most important, and sometimes most difficult, messages during my two headships, including on three occasions, tragically, telling the school about the death of a pupil or member of staff. One of these was the death of my predecessor, Elizabeth Diggory, who survived the return of cancer for only eight months of her retirement.

Elizabeth, an elegant and gracious woman, shyer than her height and bearing made people think and perhaps someone who did not altogether relish standing up and addressing 700 or so difficult-to-impress teenagers, once told me that assemblies, these ten-minute gatherings of the whole school at 8.40 in the morning, were times when the Paulinas ‘expected to be entertained intellectually’. Privately resolving that this sense of entitlement would be something to coax them out of, I used the early assemblies of my headship not so much for any grand pronouncements or displays of intellectual skill but to introduce myself as a person. It was important as part of getting to know each other to show that the ‘high mistress’ was not just a formal figurehead in academic dress, only slightly more animated than the portraits of her predecessors lining the walls, but an individual with interests, tastes and opinions and importantly, flaws – someone you might get to know. At the start of my first term, for example, it had been twelve months since the news of my appointment had become public. Plenty of time for myths of various kinds to precede me, not all of which I scotched straight away. I came from a school in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire: where was that exactly – in the Midlands somewhere? Was it true that I planned to introduce uniform into this highly individualistic school, where the pupils all choose their own clothes? Did I really run marathons? While allowing certain myths to continue – the uniform one added a certain frisson – I talked to the girls and staff about my interests, my experiences – and occasionally my mistakes. Over the first few years, this involved forays into Thomas Hardy’s novels (my best attempt at a Dorset accent); a challenge to one of my predecessor’s adages that a Paulina should be taught to ‘think and not cook’ (they can of course do both), which involved baking a loaf of bread on the stage in my trusty Panasonic bread machine (the fire alarm having been briefly disabled); and an account of my re-education by the City of London Police following a speeding fine. Whether these stories ‘entertained intellectually’ was for others to say: what I hope they did was to give some sense of the high mistress as a human being, with preferences, foibles and failings, just like anyone else.

The various rituals of the start of the year almost done, I always felt relieved to feel the term begin to get into its rhythm. But the patterning of the academic year and the frame that it gave to everything we did was always there. What other kind of life is marked by such a formal structure? In the UK, three ‘terms’ are divided by three holidays still – in most schools – aligned traditionally to the Christian calendar: we have the Christmas holidays, the Easter holidays and then the long summer break. In the midst of each term there are the half-term holidays, sometimes lasting for a week but in many cases for two in the autumn. A regular and predictable pattern, published by most schools a year in advance. Before the current move by some families towards taking holidays in term time, when flights and accommodation are generally far cheaper, this was an absolute red line that could not be crossed. As high mistress I would write a letter to parents at the start and end of most terms and one of my crisper efforts included the words: ‘Thank you for not asking me if you can leave two days early at the end of term because the flights are less crowded.’ But even then it did not entirely work. And my cause certainly wasn’t helped when I made my own mistake about holiday dates shortly after Adam, my son, started at a new school. Thinking to celebrate my mother’s birthday, I had booked a five-day trip to Venice for my mother, myself and the children at summer half term. Half term is always a week, isn’t it? Only at my son Adam’s school, I discovered a week before departure, that half term was actually only two days. Paralysed with embarrassment, I picked up the phone to launch a major charm offensive on the deputy head. ‘I thought it would have real educational value, Carl,’ I wheedled, hoping desperately this wasn’t going to go right round the staffroom the minute I put the phone down. ‘That’s all right, Clarissa – these things happen,’ came the reply after a short pause, during which I realised Carl had been stifling amusement sufficient for his broad grin not to be audible down the phone. We went to Venice: the sun shone, the water slapped against the jetty outside the hotel. I still have the picture of my mother sitting on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute and of Adam in his gondolier’s hat. But I didn’t make that mistake again, and I always remembered to be particularly respectful to Adam’s deputy head. Unsurprisingly, I have since been a little more tolerant of the occasional ‘diary moment’.

An aspect of the school year which causes more widespread problems for parents is the dogged idiosyncrasy of individual schools. A year or so ago I read a very sensible letter from a grandfather who was concerned about the strain on his daughter, struggling as she was to juggle the demands of the slightly different term and holiday dates of her four school-aged children. I’m no mathematician but you can quickly work out that this poor woman was racing round trying to avoid the Carl conversation over no fewer than forty-eight potential dates during the year. And that’s before she started trying to take account of the extra holidays, special half-days and INSET (in-service training) days that are squeezed in to confuse parents by these ‘constantly on holiday’ teachers. It shouldn’t be beyond independent schools in the same city – London, say – to agree to have the same holiday dates, should it? Try suggesting it. I somewhat naively did so at a regional heads’ meeting, where people looked at me with that indulgent incredulity reserved for those asking why Oxford and Cambridge colleges can’t adopt consistent admissions procedures. Feeling the weight of centuries of baroque and inexplicable process settle like a vast smothering tapestry over my head, I said no more.

We have the formal structure of years and terms. And then there is the shape of each day. As Larkin puts it with beautiful simplicity:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?[1]

In a school, the regular set pattern of each day is often punctuated and symbolised by the ringing of bells for lessons and break time. Some might think this restrictive: imagine being an adult and still having your day determined by a bell every half an hour or so. In my experience, as a teacher, it’s a way of making sure you have the most exceptionally productive day. You might long for a precious free period to get your marking done, but it isn’t possible to find you’ve wasted over half an hour noodling around on your phone if you have twenty eager faces in front of you ready to discover the Russian language and you only have that particular thirty-five minutes in which to help them do so. A class cannot be kept waiting! And again, there is comfort in the familiar regularity. We conducted an experiment at St Paul’s to see whether to change the shape of the school day, but after a lengthy and highly consultative process, we decided more or less to keep things as they were. There was something in the rhythm and pattern that seemed balanced, as if we were biologically adapted: the changed day felt by turns piecemeal and baggy, lacking in proper flow – just wrong, somehow.

Living to the discipline of the academic year, week and day has its frustrations and constraints. At the same time, it provides a familiar rhythm from which we can draw confidence, security and comfort. I believe that the pattern and structure which we become used to at school meets a more fundamental and lifelong human need: to feel ourselves located, grounded, placed in relation to the world around us. To lack that – and sometimes in life if we are untethered from our moorings and face periods of confusion or loss – produces a feeling very like the homesickness we might recall from childhood. In a world of expanding possibilities and greater uncertainty we are fortunate that in schools, our children’s lives still have this regular pattern: its cycle of peaks and troughs of concentration, anticipated special days and traditional events, giving the school year a safe and familiar rhythm. And just as a school encourages ambition and challenges its pupils to take intellectual risks and aim high, it balances this with a longer perspective, with patience and compassion. If you mess things up, there will be a chance to start again: next half, next term, next year.